Active Governance and Smart Citizenship

Cities are increasingly dependent on networks, sensors, and microcontrollers. Artificial intelligence has managed to mimic human behavior, and in a few years, many jobs may be replaced by computers or machines. Today, smart cities are evolving in all countries from the poorest to the most economically viable, and there are many smart city applications that rely on observation and participation of the citizens. Active citizens are interested in the benefits of their city, and they are involved in improving and promoting urban living. All levels of smart citizen participation are associated with liberal citizenship and personal autonomy and the choice of individuals to perform specific roles and take responsibility for their actions. The states in turn provide liberal forms of government. Smart cities need “smart people” who can take an active part in both governance and city reform. This kind of citizen participation is more than just a ritual participation in government.

Adulthood and the Right to Education

This chapter argues that holding personal autonomy as a political ideal entails a right to education over a full life, not just childhood. The first section reviews the terms under which autonomy is commonly held to be basic to liberal citizenship and how this justifies an individual right to a basic compulsory education in childhood. The second section argues that the tendency to see this right as applying to childhood only is due to an unduly narrow view of autonomy as a political ideal. Finally, it defends an expanded view of autonomy that justifies a role for education in a good life in media res. This role is held to be sufficiently important enough to warrant extending citizens’ educational rights to include post-compulsory provision.

Toxic Positivity?

This article examines how, in the public eye, the hooker became happy. Extending Sara Ahmed’s concept of the “happiness duty,” the article explicates how sex positivity has inaugurated “respectability” politics within sex worker social movements. The author argues that sex worker social movements have sought to change public debates about commercial sex, vis-à-vis an antistereotype strategy that reimagined the sex worker as a sex-positive feminist, distinguished less by her critical politics of pleasure and more by the implication that she freely chooses and finds happiness in her work. Emphasizing happiness has allowed sex workers to become legible as political actors within preexisting terms of liberal citizenship. This strategy, however, has effectively affirmed the cultural logics of the “rescue industry” and poses significant challenges to cross-class, -racial, and -age solidarity among those in the sex trades. To make this argument, the author analyzes original oral history interviews and sex worker cultural production associated with the Lusty Lady theater. A historically significant and recently closed commercial sex franchise located in San Francisco and Seattle, the Lusty Lady serves as a unique access point for understanding sex worker social movements, as it was a central institution in sex worker counterpublics. This article enhances analyses of sex worker social movements by considering how sex positivity has both cohered and constrained sex worker social movements.

Liberal States, Authoritarian Families

How can liberals justify adult authority over children? Children are born requiring both subordination to adults and education to equip them for citizenship. These requirements are especially vexing for liberal democracies, for whom the exercise of authority is at odds with the natural liberty and equality of citizens. This difficulty has led some liberal theorists to appeal to the liberal state as a model for familial relations and reject parental authority. My book shows that this effort is misguided, and that early liberals understood parental authority as a necessary protection for children’s own future liberty. It was early modern absolutist theorists—Bodin, Filmer, and Hobbes—who sought congruence between the family and the state, arguing that absolute paternal authority was a salutary education for absolutism’s subjects. But early liberals like Locke and Rousseau opposed congruence. Even as they sought to restrict public authority and limit the formal power of parents, they nonetheless sought to strengthen their private authority over children. They saw that undermining traditional authorities would not issue straightforwardly in freedom but would instead elevate the authority of public opinion to new heights and subject citizens to a new tyranny of opinion. To counteract this threat, they buttressed the pedagogical authority of the family to protect children’s future intellectual liberty and defend liberal citizenship. Their educational writings reveal an important corrective insight for modern liberalism: authority is not only not the enemy of liberty, but actually a necessary prerequisite for it.

The Roles of Settler Canadians within Decolonization: Re-evaluating Invitation, Belonging and Rights

This article, grounded within the argument that liberal citizenship and recognition-based approaches to decolonization are inappropriate responses to Indigenous calls to decolonize, proposes an alternative approach premised on re-evaluating non-Indigenous understandings of invitation, belonging and rights within the Canadian settler state. I suggest that non-Indigenous peoples consider themselves “foreigners” in need of invitation onto Indigenous lands and that, as colonial denizens, non-Indigenous Canadians take up an ethos that encourages them to re-evaluate their lives and relations with Indigenous peoples, Indigenous lands and the settler state. Such re-evaluations would encourage settlers to question the sovereignty of the state and their daily relations, as well as encourage them to place responsibilities to others above inwardly focused rights. I contend that identifying and acting upon such an ethos can provide a way through which non-Indigenous peoples can appropriately and seriously meet Indigenous peoples’ calls for change.